Roll of Honour 2023

F OREWORD (4)

The trauma of reading out the lists of the fallen in Chapel every Friday (often with siblings in the congregation) was left to the Warden William Ferguson who, like Henry Kendall two decades later, was often left emotionally drained by the ordeal. Of the alumni who were part of The Great War effort, 39% joined the School before 1900. Cowell’s own figures show that 43% of all boys who had joined the School since its inception in 1863 fought in this war, an astonishing statistic. Also, the School’s eventual attrition rate was amongst the highest of any peer public school. Like so many schools, St. Edward’s would lose the ‘flower of its alumni’, with several families losing more than one member and the Isle of Wight-based Usshers losing all three sons. Wherever the fighting was fiercest, there you would find members of the Teddies contingent - Vimy Ridge, The Somme, Mons, Passchendaele, The Aisne, Loos, The Marne, Messines, Givenchy and Arras as well as in faraway Macedonia, West Africa, India and of course the Dardanelles. While the majority were in the army, there was a notable group in the Royal Navy and towards the end of the war, the Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force.

Going through each individual case, the later researcher cannot help but be struck by the apparent stoicism of those involved and the tragedy of ‘what might have been’ had there been no war. The inevitable instances of ‘No Known Grave’ are particularly haunting even now; just how those families coped with nowhere to visit and mourn is difficult to comprehend. A full list of The Great War decorations won by the School contingent is listed in Appendix (iii) in my 2015 book “Members of a Very Noble Friendship”. Also, a full list of every OSE/Teacher who fought in the Boer War/

W ARDEN W ILLIAM F ERGUSON

Great War is held on various spreadsheets in the archive files. Every effort has been made to find out as much as possible about the fallen from the School archives, regimental diaries, family records, the indispensable ‘Chronicles’, edited throughout this war by Wilfrid Cowell and John Millington Sing, who would have known all those involved intimately. Finally, a huge effort has been made over many years to find images of these members of the School community as they add so much to the narrative. As can be seen, not every search has been successful sadly, although those for The Great War were far more in evidence than in the second conflict.